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Patrick Gerard

@patrikgerard.bsky.social
200 followers 381 following 52 posts

phd student @usc-isi | info diffusion, nlp patrickgerard.co

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Patrick Gerard @patrikgerard.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
Excited to share that our paper on Density-Guided Response Optimization has been accepted to ACM FAccT! We show that local density in embedding space encoded recoverable community preference signal, and this can be used for alignment without explicit preference annotations.
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Patrick Gerard @patrikgerard.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
New post (thanks to @annieknk.bsky.social for her edits+feedback) looking at the structural forces that make misinformation and disinformation so hard to combat, why current responses like fact-checking keep falling short, and what that means for American democracy. open.substack.com/pub/american...
open.substack.com
American Unreality — Part 2: The Social Gravity of the Lie
Springfield and the Social Production of Reality
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Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 @joshuaeakle.com · 03/02/2026
This week, Temporary Protected Status for 350K Haitians in the U.S. was set to expire, with no White House plan to renew it. Many warned this would lead to mass roundups of people unable to safely return to Haiti. Today, Judge Reyes blocked it from happening. Her ruling was scathing. 👇
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Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
A federal judge stayed Noem’s decision to end Haiti’s temporary protected status, thank goodness. But it's still vital to understand how "they're eating the pets" participatory propaganda was used to motivate and justify that policy change. This article gives a detailed breakdown of that effort.
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Kristina Lerman @kristinalerman.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
Heads up everyone - There is likely to be a large ICE operation tomorrow in Springfield OH. Check out this brilliant piece by my former USC student who explores how this anti-immigrant campaign was engineered using ancient tropes like blood libel.
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Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
Highly recommend this article showing how the "They're Eating the Pets" refrain emerged from the right's participatory propaganda machine. Extremely relevant, as many Haitian immigrants (the targets of that false rumor/campaign) lose their status Feb 3. americanunreality.substack.com/p/american-u...
americanunreality.substack.com
American Unreality — Part 1: Springfield, Ohio
The Story That Devoured a Town
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Patrick Gerard @patrikgerard.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
ICE is reportedly preparing operations in Springfield and TPS expires tomorrow. We're likely about to see a surge of rhetoric justifying the raids. I wanted to get the full timeline documented -- to show how unfounded it all is: open.substack.com/pub/american...
open.substack.com
American Unreality — Part 1: Springfield, Ohio
The Story That Devoured a Town
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Naomi Klein @naomiaklein.bsky.social · 03/01/2026
On the "boots on the ground" question and Trump saying that it will mainly be about protecting oil operations. Given this framing, we should expect a massive payday for politically connected mercenary companies, who will use this to expand their private armies.
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Giuliano Formisano @giulianoformisano.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
📣📣 New paper with #JoergFriedrichs, @florianschaffner.bsky.social, @niklasstoehr.bsky.social , “Populism and governmentalism as thin-centered ideologies: Emotions and frames on social media” is out at @ejprjournal.bsky.social Read more: doi.org/10.1017/S147...
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Patrick Gerard @patrikgerard.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
Had a great time last week at the Oxford Internet Institute’s (@oii.ox.ac.uk) Future of Social Media Research workshop! I presented my work on cross-platform discourse networks — moving past platform silos to a unified view of the online information ecosystem. Presentation: tinyurl.com/gerard-oii
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Patrick Gerard @patrikgerard.bsky.social · 16/11/2025
Happy to say this was accepted at ICWSM 2026!
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
Social media users adopt the toxic behaviors of ingroup members An analysis of 7 million tweets from over 700,000 accounts finds that exposures to toxic behavior by ingroup members is the primary driver of contagious toxicity online academic.oup.com/jcmc/article...
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Patrick Gerard @patrikgerard.bsky.social · 20/10/2025
(Second Conspiracy Pattern) Similar trajectory with COVID lab-leak/Fauci narratives—claims about NIH gain-of-function research and intentional virus creation. Telegram ⚪ + Truth Social 🟣 dominate early and throughout Later gains ground on Twitter 🔵 and TikTok 🔴 Very similar pattern :0
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Patrick Gerard @patrikgerard.bsky.social · 20/10/2025
New paper + interactive dashboard on the 2024 election information ecosystem. Building on discourse networks work with @hanshanley.bsky.social @luceriluc.bsky.social @emilioferrara.bsky.social—this lets us visualize the online landscape as a unified system, rather than isolating each platform.
Comparison diagram showing traditional vs discourse network user representations. Left: isolated platform-specific clusters with no cross-platform connections. Right: unified network where users are connected across platforms through shared narrative engagement, revealing previously invisible cross-platform communities.
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Patrick Gerard @patrikgerard.bsky.social · 22/06/2025
🧵 FINALLY, excited to have been invited to present a pitch talk at the #DETOX workshop at @icwsm.bsky.social 2025, organized by @alessianetwork.bsky.social , @lajello.bsky.social l, Alessandro Galeazzi, & Eugenia Polizzi. Link to the workshop is here! detox-workshop.github.io/website.gith...
detox-workshop.github.io
DETOX@ICWSM2025
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Patrick Gerard @patrikgerard.bsky.social · 22/06/2025
While I'm here, I might as well post about my newest work with @luceriluc.bsky.social and @emilioferrara.bsky.social in which we built a platform-agnostic framework that models and connects users as distributions over latent narratives rather than interactions.
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Patrick Gerard @patrikgerard.bsky.social · 22/06/2025
🧵 ALSO Excited to present our work on "othering" at @icwsm.bsky.social 2025! In this paper with @kristinalerman.bsky.social, we go beyond traditional (hate|fear) speech to identify and study the mechanisms of "othering" language: the subtle process of depicting outgroups as fundamentally different.
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Patrick Gerard @patrikgerard.bsky.social · 22/06/2025
🧵 Excited to present at @icwsm.bsky.social 2025! In this paper with @kristinalerman.bsky.social, we introduce a novel framework for modeling narrative evolution in streaming text data. Link here: arxiv.org/abs/2409.07684
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Ross Dahlke @rossdahlke.bsky.social · 22/03/2025
Across 26 countries and using a database of 32M tweets, radical-right populist elites are the most likely to spread misinformation, finds @pettertornberg.bsky.social & @julianachueri.bsky.social doi.org/10.1177/1940...
When Do Parties Lie? Misinformation and Radical-Right Populism Across 26 CountriesFigure 1Figure 2Figure 3
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Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 20/01/2025
This multi-year, multi-country analysis shows that right-wing populist politicians spread more online misinfo than their mainstream counterparts and explains how “the rise of political misinformation is associated to the recent wave of radical-right populism.” journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
Screenshot of a paper in the International Journal of Press/Politics. Title: When Do Parties Lie? Misinformation and Radical-Right Populism Across 26 Countries. Authors: Petter Törnberg and Juliana Chueri. Abstract: The spread of misinformation has emerged as a global concern. Academic attention has recently shifted to emphasize the role of political elites as drivers of misinformation. Yet, little is known of the relationship between party politics and the spread of misinformation—in part due to a dearth of cross-national empirical data needed for comparative study. This article examines which parties are more likely to spread misinformation, by drawing on a comprehensive database of 32M tweets from parliamentarians in 26 countries, spanning 6years and several election periods. The dataset is combined with external databases such as Parlgov and V-Dem, linking the spread of misinformation to detailed information about political parties and cabinets, thus enabling a comparative politics approach to misinformation. Using multilevel analysis with random country intercepts, we find that radical-right populism is the strongest determinant for the propensity to spread misinformation. Populism, left- wing populism, and right-wing politics are not linked to the spread of misinformation. These results suggest that political misinformation should be understood as part and parcel of the current wave of radical right populism, and its opposition to liberal democratic institution.
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